A Jam Session

HORKHEIMER: The regression of mankind is always a possibility.

ARDORNO: Barbarism always an option.

ME: Especially after a revolution.

NIETZSCHE: One herd. Everyone wants the same thing.

ME (interrupting): And things.

NIETZSCHE (continuing): Whoever thinks otherwise is ostracised.

ADORNO: State or government control grows in tandem with a growth in irrationality.

HORKHEIMER: The world is mad and will remain so. It is no longer possible to distinguish between good and bad.

HORKHEIMER: All hope lies in thought.

ADORNO: True thought is thought that does not insist on being right.

HORKHEIMER: But theory is theory; often bad theory, when what the world needs is fundamental change in both thought and action.

ADORNO: A happiness brought about by practice.

HORKHEIMER: Like eating roast goose. To not just think but to do. All our thoughts and actions must fit together.

ADORNO: The ideal, the next step, but not grasped directly, only indirectly.

HORKHEIMER: What is Marx's view?

MARX: The time is ripe for it.

HORKHEIMER: Or we take the fatalistic view and declare we cannot bring about change.

ADORNO: A message in a bottle, expressed as bluntly as possible, to change consciousness.

Picture credit: The Marx Lounge, Alfredo Jaar (source: WikiArt).

See Towards a New Manifesto by Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer (A Verso publication, translated by Rodney Livingstone). 

This twisted version written October 2022.

The Eight-in-One Sermon

A “must” is something required by necessity and must never be compromised … But “free” is that in which I have choice, and may use or not … do not make a “must” out of what is “free”. This is a misuse of liberty.

We have the “right to speak”, but not the “right to enforce”. We should preach the Word, but the results must be solely left to God … Faith must come freely without coercion. No way!

… we have no greater enemy than our own heart. God's reign is not in physical or outward objects, those things we are able to touch or sense, but in faith … [we all must have] a firm trust that Christ, the Son of God … has taken all our sins upon his shoulders … [however] we are not all the same and we do not all have the same amount of faith. The faith of one may be more robust than another.

… we should treat our neighbour as God has treated us … [I] urge you to faith and love. I commend you to God.

… there are many doubtful matters which we cannot resolve or find the answer to on our own … Confess to another person privately and hear the absolution … [or] confess to God directly. It is a comforting practice.

God bless. Amen.

Picture credit: Martin Luther, c.1532, Lucas Cranach the Elder (source: WikiArt).

See The Ninety-Five Theses and Other Writings (particularly Eight Sermons in Lent, 1522) by Martin Luther, Penguin Classics (translated by William R. Russell).

Written October 2022.

Enemies of Literature

Some people are enemies of literature. Enemies of writers and readers. Afraid of words or the time it occupies.

Some people are afraid of the world, afraid of being out in it.

Some people prefer to theorise from a comfortable spot, all they need is the right materials; materials that supply the information they want or didn't know they wanted, information they can collect facts or phrases from. Their mind more a river than a place, moving and changing all the time, sifting and sorting. These people won't alter, not for anyone or anything. They like the old cotton-wool life: safe, familiar, contained.

These people, though, can still be shocked by the words they read: disturbed, repulsed, revolted, and wish an article hadn't been recommended them and they hadn't subsequently decided: yes, they would read.

Oh it was dark, too dark for them, this boy's, this man's perspective. This mind from 1975 was too depraved. Such darkness should have stayed private, been kept from public gaze.

Picture credit: The Sinner, 1904, John Collier (source: WikiArt).

Some thoughts, some phrase plagiarisms in reading First Love, Last Rites by Ian McEwan. 

Written October 2022.

Imperfect Characters

We all have one, (said Rafferty), a guardian angel. Do we, thought I. Sometimes I'm not so sure … I strain to see the flying angel pinned to the lapel of his wrinkled blue jacket and fail, though I think I can just make out in the fading light a green and gold harp on the other.

He's told (by a woman) 'No one is given a life just to throw it away.' Is that what I'm doing too, I ask, though more quietly, less destructively than Rafferty. Rooted to place, yet exiled in the mind from society. Maybe.

Delia serves the dog its usual saucer of tea with milk. And I instantly see Nan serving Sam-dog the same in a bowl, his post-lunch, post-beach-walk thirst quenched, the same as ours.

Delia has lost the rapport she once had with God. The prayers she mouths less heartfelt now. And yet her heart feels all the things she has forgotten. That is why she cries. But why am I crying? I have forgotten what it feels like to be hugged, to be touched.

Mildred has loved too well. Her heart remembers and still registers (as does mine) thunderbolts. Yes, full of Desdemona. Yes, full of the youthful pursuit, of the unexpected visits of Mr Gentleman. Her heart given outright – never do that – but she gave. Unwisely, yes. With the voice of Molly Bloom. Yes! And all the style that Joyce possessed. Edna O'Brien, yes, I think I think I think.

*

Always a surprising twist – violent, confronting, shocking. Always a distance, a part cut off. Always a feeling, some similarity or some memory dredged up. Edna O'Brien, yes. A remoteness, a closeness. A contradiction, a desire. A boundary crossed. And an all too human response. A question, an answer, an observation. The reader asks of him or her self the same. Who am I, what am I. Repeats after vain McSorley, the quarry owner: 'Be absolute in your aim.' What aim, what aim. Then tells him or her self in a firm or fragile tone: It will come. Will come.

*

Something always remains, something always festers. Remembered love, lost love. An Edna O'Brien scene forever ruminated on. The hated scene, the public scene. Women's scenes – embarrassing their men, their children. Scenes between strangers, neighbours, mothers and daughters, cousins, lovers. A scene imagined, filled in, embellished even with my own imaginings. The actors my own imperfect characters: real known people.

A scene of taking tea at the Coughlan house: a matching China tea set (cups and saucers, milk jug and sugar bowl), serving plates with shop-bought eatables placed on nesting tables. The role of Mama played by my own dear long departed nan, the daughter-narrator played by a young version of my mother. I hear Mrs Coughlan debate with Nan whether it was best to whip cream with a fork or a beater, or to, in some instances, vigorously shake the container. Mrs Coughlan saying to Mum, the daughter: 'But why ever did you come back from Australia?' And Mum explaining it was only a long working holiday; they were always – her and her beau – going to return. Mrs Coughlan, though, is not really listening, she's lost in her own thoughts, someplace else.

The emotional landscape changes …

I'm with Miss Gilhooley, 'the Spinster', who has had her quota of love. Have I had mine? Was that all? Have I ever felt safe and confident with, next to anyone? Oh hollow heart. I've let myself go when once upon a time I would have cared more. I've turned more and more to literature for love, for new friendship, for all the experiences I won't have.

A different female narrator enters … then another … There's something to take from each ( a narcissistic exercise), something perhaps that only I know or see or feel unbeknownst to or unperceived by others.

Will my words, if they outlive me, also tell of a woman desperately trying to explain herself?

Oh Edna O'Brien, yes, you've done it now.

Literature, the only alchemy there is.

Picture credit: Desdemona, Frederic Leighton (source: WikiArt).

See Saints and Sinners by Edna O'Brien.

Journal entries, October 2022.

The King James Version

A religious code, a moral code, a battle code. A dictionary. An encyclopaedia. A treasure chest of sayings, of teachings now its mysteries are unlocked. The mouth of Everyman with their English-speaking tongues. Everyman now a judge, freely opining and interpreting, quoting from.

Picture credit: The Bible, 1845, George Harvey (source: WikiArt).

See The Book of Books by Melvyn Bragg.

From journal, October 2022. 

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is useful. Nostalgia is, in some instances, practical. A fiction I tell myself. For it's not. Nostalgia is rose-tinted and limiting. More sorrowful than perhaps enjoyable, for these people are gone, that time is spent. Nostalgia is a hungriness to see, hear, be with them, or be them again; to be in that buried past, to be that buried self. Undisciplined, it rattles bars. The remembering self wants in but nostalgia can only take you so far; and yet, it can prevent you from focusing on the present and the future. I will understand myself through my past, through my inherited past, forgetting that sometimes to comprehend you have to live.

Picture credit: Nostalgia, Grigoriy Goldstein (source: WikiArt).

From journal, October 2022.

Anguished Youth

In my head I have led many different lives and had many romantic adventures, just as marvellous or as incredible as those in books or on the big screen. I have brooded often upon these dreams and let a strange unrest creep into my soul. I have yearned to meet these images in some way in the real world – but how to seek them? Or have them seek (and find) me? I have each time come to believe that without any act of my own they would encounter me: we would meet as if meant to be, and any doubts I might have held would in that moment fall away. Day after day, silent, watchful … until the madness passes and the heart calms.

I have mirrored, I am still mirroring (at forty-one!) Stephen Dedalus' anguished youth.

Picture credit: James Joyce in 1915  by Alex Ehrenzweig (source: Wikipedia).

See A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. 

From journal and a larger body of thought on Stephen Dedalus, September 2022.

The Problem of Being

The problem of being a dreamer, a reader, a writer is fantasy. Most other people live in the world, whereas the dreamer, the reader, the writer is carried out of it, either involving themselves in the true or fictive tale of strangers, or dreaming for themselves the impossible, the miraculous, even to some degree believing this reality could happen, or at the very least feeling these delusions to be safer. There is no possibility of being really hurt or causing pain to someone else, and any perceived deficiencies and inadequacies don't matter – they can more easily be overlooked or overcome. And illusions, well, they have none of the humdrum, as they naturally take place in a different world than the one inhabited; these two realities are separated, one inside the mind, one without. Although, of course, if this line grows blurred, converges, sanity may depart or the closely observed discipline of isolation may be more and more strictly exercised. In isolation – circumstantially or self imposed – starts fantasy and self-denial, such as pledges to perhaps admire those persons who are “wild” or less meek or have a geography, a personal and public history. Those who were born in one place and ended in another; those who in exile found their voice or talent, and perhaps too the “home” they failed to see when they lived there; those who like our ancestors are forever moving, making, and marking, their territory by naming their “things” in it; those whose instinctive sense of direction is not like the dreamer, the reader, the writer blunted by settlement and rootedness.

Picture credit: Guardian of Desert, 1941, Nicholas Roerich (source: WikiArt)

From journal, September 2022.

Irish Roots

As the nation pays their respects to the late Queen I reflect on my Irish sides, my ancestry through both lines: paternal and maternal, the former being stronger than the latter. Driscoll and Healy and Connors. A gentle melancholy takes possession, an inherited yearning for Ireland, the old country, though in what parts my Irish roots are I do not know. My ancestors left long long ago, set up new roots in Wales and in England; and yet from time to time the old country draws me. The accents, the stories.

Written September 2022.

O'Malley Home, Achill Island, County Mayo, Ireland, 1913, Robert Henri (source: WikiArt).

One German, One British

The same trench life, the same trench warfare in the same savage landscape. The same iron messengers with their hissing song. The same injured routine: dressing-stations and military hospitals, then back to the front, returned to their unit, their division, their regiment, their platoon, their troop. The same variety of words with the same meaning used. The same tiny imponderables – a chance meeting, some random thing – determining one's fate, one's position in the same war. Nothing (experience-wise) between them: Jünger and Blunden, one German, one British.

From journal, September 2022. 

See Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger.

Picture credit: Spring in the Trenches, Ridge Woods, 1917, Paul Nash (source: Imperial War Museum, London / WikiArt),

The Road to Byron

Intrigued by Bruce Chatwin's mention of his spineless and floodstained copy of Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana, and of how he attempted to ape Byron's itinerary and journal style I obtained my own well-bound, less marked library volume. While I have no wish to follow Chatwin following Byron's actual footsteps I could at least try to understand, I thought, why Oxiana is considered a masterpiece of 1930s travel writing, and compare too Chatwin and Byron's two journal entries: 5 July 1962 and 21 September 1933. Of the first it's too soon to say if I agree with the masterly verdict, though it's certainly enjoyable; of the second the similarities are all too obvious.

However, Byron moves in circles unknown to me. His companion Christopher is not explained. In Palestine Christopher is 'received as the son of his father.' Who is his father? On the next page I gather his father is Sir Mark Sykes. Still a blank, that is, it means nothing, but at least it's a name.

Who is Rutter? Perhaps a fellow correspondent for a London newspaper if I presume Byron was in that line already or knew associates in it?

Who is Herzfeld? I'm left with the distinct impression he must be an archaeologist, or at the very least has a keen interest in archaeology, who, 'it seems, has turned Persepolis into his private domain.'

Names and networking. What Oxiana doesn't provide I must research. Alternatively, I could, I suppose, accept my conjectures.

*

I continue to read with one eye on the journey and one eye gathering information: Christopher breadcrumbs. Christopher is fond of Persia. Christopher has friends in prominent positions. Christopher reads Gibbon; he must therefore like history. Christopher's hero is a German soldier called Wassmuss. Christopher told the Tabriz police (in French) he was a philosphe. (Byron said he was a painter, whereas Wikipedia lists him as an author, historian and art critic.) Christopher is liked by biting insects, particularly fleas.

Christopher Hugh Sykes, English writer, second son of Conservative Party politician and diplomatic advisor Sir Mark Sykes. (I failed to take note of his mother, not even her name, for which I now feel ashamed; his sister however did raise sufficient interest for me to jot 'Sculptor'. A clue perhaps to more I possibly thought but didn't follow up.) Christopher led a full and active life, stints here and there – in the Foreign Office and British Embassy in Berlin where Harold Nicolson was counsellor, before switching to Oriental Studies and pursuing other adventures. He married too (with issue), though again I didn't note who or when, and so the legacy of Sykes' continues.

Christopher explained, though the information gained unsupported by any other source other than Wikipedia.

The Herzfeld breadcrumbs grow but remain unsolved. At a lunch Byron introduces him as 'Professor', and Herzfeld speaks, to dissipate the boredom, of his domesticated porcupine. There it stops...then, some pages later, I think to turn to the index...Aha! Professor Ernst Herzfeld.

Who, though, is Noel?

I will never know who Noel is, who the Noels were – a party (of Noels) was mentioned, but I have verified from an unreliable source that Ernst Emil Herzfeld was a German archaeologist and Iranologist, who was appointed Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology in Berlin in 1920. He surveyed and documented many historical sites, but was later forced to leave his professorship in 1935 due to his Jewish descent.

Another Byron-dropped name is demystified.

From journal (from a series of Byron entries), August-September 2022. 

See The Road to Oxiana (Vintage Books) by Robert Byron.

Picture credit: Robert Byron (source: Good Reads).

One House, One Person

Things fade; time grows. Mechanics obey and alternatives – other possibilities – are excluded. All that is passed or lost is dreamed of. All that did or didn't happen, or can never happen now. The loss of a house, the loss of a person, though both in their own way still living. Perhaps still standing but disguised; perhaps solely existing in the mind, as was. One house, one person to which the waking and sleeping mind return, no link between them.

Picture credit: Empire of Light, Rene Magritte (source: www.renemagritte.org).

Written August 2022.

Om

The inward eye, the bliss (and the woe) of solitude, enclosed within the cult of self, literally scratching at wounds, fictionally beating the old heirloom, the dinner gong. Session begineth; session endeth.

A figure sitteth (on the sofa), head bowed, fictionally covered by the matriarch's (Nan Miriam's) black lace mantilla, eyes closed, inhale...exhale...Buddhist breath, Buddhist count, and inner voice chant: empty mind om empty mind om.

But no, a jungle of noises (from outside) creeps in, and bright mental images flash – a parrot, a hummingbird – in and out of the canvas. Word thoughts, often unconnected, destroy its silent blankness once and for all. The parrots now talk politically: 'A democratic “free” country does not exile divisions nor unite them; they exist just the same.' GONG!

Written under the influence of Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh just prior to the news breaking in the UK of Rushdie being stabbed, 12 August 2022.

Picture credit: Me and My Parrots, 1941, Frieda Kahlo (source: www.fridakahlo.org)

Other

I read Toni Morrison – her essays, her speeches, her meditations – and my mind roams over the people I have known who were Other to me. This Otherness as it's now classed is a relatively new language. I didn't see these neighbours, these friends, these colleagues as Other at the time I knew them; now I would, because this Otherness has permeated language. I cannot now not see it (or past it); I cannot now not censor myself in any exchanges there might be or reflect on my part in them afterwards. Our racial discourses have damaged my natural inclination to want to know and to befriend people, all different types of individuals. It has, within me, created barriers. I cannot now engage on any deep level because there is always a risk of being misunderstood; I cannot express myself as I would to someone who I know to be “safe”, that is, we are already known to each other, we have history. There is only the page, yet even here I do not say explicitly what I want to say, for the page is now Other too.

See Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison. 

From journal, August 2022.

Picture credit: Other Voices, 1995, Jamie Wyeth (source: WikiArt).

Master / Slave

Master. Slave. Is it harder to live life as a free man, a free woman than as a slave? An ancient idea, but is there still some kernel of truth in it? Truth perhaps that we daren't voice, daren't consider? We are “free and equal by law.” Are we? And even if we are or feel we are lawfully as compared, say, to slavery times or more snobbish eras, is being free – and knowing ourselves to be free and at liberty – not just a feeling, one which can be suppressed or explored as the mood takes or as our own circumstances change or demand? Does being a free man or woman, in the modern age, mean having the ability to impose – to impress upon ourselves – the conditions of our own freedom?

I am, in effect, Freedom's master and as its master I can usher in as well as abandon old laws. Freedom chained; Freedom controlled.

A thought which occurred when reading Deceit, Desire & the Novel by René Girard, written July 2022.

Picture credit: Chained Prisoner, 1806-1812, Francisco Goya, (source: WikiArt).

Ye Gods

Down into the belly of the ship. Ye gods! Where must the burial chamber be? Dig, dig, dig. A pyramid, tiny and gold (a piece of jewellery?) with very intricate clorisonné work. Ye gods. Grave goods. Gold and more gold, everything gold.

A sceptre! Ye gods. The grave – or memorial – of a king.

See The Dig by John Preston.

From journal, written July 2022. 

Picture credit: View of the excavation of the ship-burial at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, England. c.1930's, British Museum.

I Am A Story

NEVILLE: Bernard says there is always a story. I am a story.

All of the Waveses are: a story in themselves. Distinguishable from each other; and yet I sometimes forget whom is speaking. They are all waves of the same sea, flowing and curving. I am Jinny; I am Susan; I am Rhoda. I am in my school uniform, the rich green, the dark blue; I see the various mirrors I have looked into: where in the room they were placed, what they showed, what they cut off; I am absorbed in a day-dream as scenes of life flash past car windows.

JINNY: There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe.

Time flows forwards, backwards; memories rise, fall.

BERNARD: There is a wandering thread lightly joining one thing to another.

I am Jinny; I am Susan; I am Rhoda.

I am now Bernard: too complex; I float, unattached. Now Neville, with some fatal hesitancy in my make-up. Now Louis; even Percival. I am all.

See The Waves by Virginia Woolf.

Picture credit: Receding Waves, 1883, Claude Monet (source: WikiArt)

Written June 2022.